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A Defense of Focō, Ergo Volō: I Focus, Therefore I Will
Paperback
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Publisher: Independently Published
Published: Dec 28 2025
Pages: 226
Weight: 0.68
Height: 0.52 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
What gives us the power to choose?
For centuries, philosophy has debated free will without agreeing on where it actually lives. This book argues that agency does not arise from abstract choice or hidden mechanisms, but from something far more immediate.
Since Descartes' declared Cogito, ergo sum I think, therefore I am four centuries ago, philosophy has possessed an undeniable foundation for knowledge, but none for agency. The certainty that one exists was secured. The certainty that one wills was not. Volition has remained suspended between metaphysical speculation and mechanical explanation, asserted by intuition yet denied by theory.
A Defense of Focō, ergo volō argues that this gap can finally be closed by identifying a level of description at which agency becomes unavoidable rather than optional.
This book defends a simple but radical axiom: I focus, therefore I will, - Focō, ergo volō
It argues that directing attention is the performative ground of agency itself. The capacity to focus and orient awareness is what makes anything thinkable, intelligible, or actionable in the first place. Before one can doubt, affirm, decide, or understand anything, attention must already be at work, shaping the field in which thought can occur.
Any attempt to deny this already depends on the very capacity it would deny. In this sense, volition is not inferred from what follows experience. It is enacted in the very gesture that makes experience coherent. You are even exercising it right now, in reading and understanding these lines. If this is true, then agency is not something we occasionally possess, it is something we are continuously enacting whenever we attend, hesitate, choose, or understand.
The argument proceeds neither by metaphysical speculation nor by appeal to unresolved empirical debates. It identifies volition at the level of necessity, with the capacity to focus awareness as the minimal condition for thinking, deciding, or understanding anything at all. The will is not something discovered behind experience, it is the structure through which experience becomes organized into action.
This is not a popular manifesto, and it is not a technical treatise. It is a classical philosophical defense that is precise, restrained, and foundational. The book situates this axiom within the tradition of performative and transcendental arguments while directly engaging the strongest objections from determinism, illusionism, and reductionist accounts of mind. Instead of persuasion or rhetoric, each challenge is addressed through structural analysis demonstrating that agency cannot be coherently denied without being presupposed.
Readers concerned with free will, philosophy of mind, consciousness, cognitive science, or the future of artificial agency will find here a rigorous attempt to ground volition where it has always lived: in the act of attention itself with a certainty that cannot be doubted because doubting is its proof.
The aim is not to mystify agency. Instead, this grounding gives us a visible structure that allows anything like choice, responsibility, or understanding to appear at all. This is a book for anyone who has ever wondered what it actually means to choose.Also from
Ferketic, Michael
Focō, Ergo Volō, " Focus, Therefore I Will": A Unified Model of Attention
Ferketic, Michael
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